So-called "heart by-pass" surgery is relatively common and is necessitated by blockage or partial blockage and narrowing of the coronary arteries causing ischaemia or a lack of blood supply to the heart muscle, distally. The pain felt as a result is known as angina and the result can be heart attack, death or recovery with damage to the heart muscle. The present treatment by way of heart by-pass surgery is effective but is expensive to carry cut, time consuming, and requires stopping the heart and placing the patient on a life-support artificial heart lung machine using large quantities of blood. Surgeons must then harvest leg veins or cheer arteries or both to sew into position as a by-pass from the aorta to the distal coronary artery.
It is desirable to provide a much less complicated procedure for carrying out a by-pass operation, which is not only faster and lean expensive to perform, but also results in less risk to the patient.